


Tacenda

by ncfan



Series: Fictober 2018 [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic, Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, And its attendant awfulness, Dantooine, Emotional Baggage, Female Character of Color, Female Jedi Exile - Freeform, Fictober, Fictober 2018, Gen, Light Side Jedi Exile - Freeform, Male-Female Friendship, Missing Scene, Missing Sidequest, POV Female Character, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Sith Holocron, Trauma, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-07-30 00:01:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16275080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Upon hearing of a Sith holocron loose somewhere in the plains around the Enclave, the Exile and Mical go looking for it. They find the past along with it. [Written for Fictober 2018]





	Tacenda

**Author's Note:**

> [ **CN/TW** : Trauma; PTSD; suicide; suicide ideation due to a malevolent outside force; mentions of debt slavery; disturbing imagery]
> 
> Written for the prompt, “Impressive, truly.”

Kalani had been raised with tales of the damage that could be wrought by misuse of even a Jedi holocron. She didn’t know of any initiate taken into the Jedi Order after the days of Exar Kun who hadn’t been. Those below the rank of Knight were only permitted heavily-restricted, heavily-supervised access to the Order’s holocrons, and this was one of the few things true of all Temples, all Enclaves, in a time and a galaxy where the Jedi Order was yet decentralized and the different communities could almost call themselves completely autonomous. Even Jedi Knights contended with some level of restriction—oh, how Atris had complained when she ran up against those restrictions herself.

The Jedi holocron was a wellspring of knowledge. It was wondrous and wonderful, and also dangerous. Caught unawares, they who opened a holocron could find their mind flooded with more information than it could process. The brain might ‘overload,’ the way a droid would if overtaxed, and the slow recovery from that was the least of what could happen to you. Open your mind too wide to the holocron, and it might just cause your mind to splinter.

Exar Kun was not the first Jedi to turn after delving too deeply into a holocron, and Kalani had the weary feeling (if the Jedi Order was ever reconstituted, if any holocrons were recovered, if any of them were meant to survive this), he would not be the last. Too many people equated knowledge with wisdom. Too many people, upon being exposed to the true scale of the universe, lost hope.

Sith holocrons, Kalani had not learned of until much later. The Order did not teach of them, except to warn its members never to open one, and if they found it already open, to by no means listen to anything it said. Her ignorance had not served her well when she had found an abandoned temple on Dxun full of glowing scarlet holocrons. It had not served her men well.

She didn’t like the idea that there was one lying in wait somewhere in the fields of Dantooine, just waiting for a hapless farmer to stumble across it.

“And we are certain that it is a Sith holocron that Kaevee found, and later discarded? Could it not be that it was a Jedi holocron, corrupted by some outside influence?”

Kalani shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of a Jedi holocron being corrupted before—though I suppose it’s possible; maybe if you synced it with a Sith holocron…” She tried to remember how the interface worked, how new information was uploaded into a holocron, before dismissing it as irrelevant with a shake of the head. “But there is one thing that makes me certain that it was a Sith holocron she found. She said it spoke to her.” Kalani twisted the pen she had been holding in her hands; if she slipped enough, harsh voices speaking no language she understood, and yet knew the words to anyways, echoed in the back of her head. Whispering of power and madness and death. “No matter what else is true, a Jedi holocron does not speak. It has no will of its own.”

To this, Mical nodded. Kalani could practically see the gears turning behind his blue eyes. “Yes, that is true,” he murmured. He glanced out of the window of the small, disused office in the Khoonda administrative building Administrator Adare had given him the run of, glancing out in what Kalani knew to be the direction of the Enclave. “A Jedi holocron is meant only to instruct, not persuade or corrupt.”

Something about his tone caught at a thread in Kalani’s mind. “You told me yesterday that the Republic let you study a Sith holocron.” She peered intently at Mical’s face, a frown stealing over her mouth. “What exactly did that entail?”

In a tone that reminded her of nothing quite so much as Atris, a very long time ago, after being told she didn’t have the clearance needed to look at something in the Archives, “I may have misspoken earlier; I don’t think I can really call the access I was allowed _study_. I was permitted to look at the Sith holocron, the better to be able to identify one in the field, if need be.”

“Just look at it, then?” What was the name of the man who had opened the first ghastly red holocron they had found on Dxun? “Not touch it?” How had he died? “It wasn’t open when you examined it, was it?” Had it been the long drop from the pinnacle, or the swift end of a lightsaber plunged into his own heart?

Mical seemed to guess at none of what was passing through Kalani’s mind—or if he did, he was very good at schooling his face always into neutrality. “The holocron was shut when I was shown it, and no, I wasn’t allowed to touch it. The Republic _knows_ how dangerous such tools are; the holocron is typically contained within a sealed durasteel crate, and was shown to myself and the other researchers sealed in a transparisteel display case.”

Well, at least some good had come of that horrific episode on Dxun. “Good,” Kalani mumbled. Her eyes strayed to the map lying out on the table between them, all the Xs and circles Mical had drawn, with the Enclave at the epicenter. “Now, these are the spots you think Kaevee’s most likely dump sites?”

“Yes. I’ve heard enough reports to know the strange influence a Sith holocron exerts over its bearer. Kaevee would have been drawn to a place with some power in the Force.”

Kalani narrowed her eyes. “You know a great deal about Dantooine’s local ‘hot spots,’” she said slowly, watching his face carefully for any sign of reaction. The morning sunlight pouring through the window made the air in the room hot and still and close.

If there was anything to give away, Mical did not let it slip. “As I have said, I am a historian, one who specializes in Jedi history and traditions. I did my research before coming here.”

And perhaps that was all there was to it. The information Kalani had just mentioned was restricted—under normal circumstances, you would have needed to be a Jedi to know it—but after the emptying of the High Temple, the Republic government likely took charge of the Coruscant Archives and databases. Mical was given access, however brief and however restricted, to a Sith holocron. A certain measure of access to the Coruscant Archives didn’t seem so far-fetched in light of that. And yet…

But that was not Kalani’s primary concern. “Even so, we have no guarantee that the holocron is still at the initial dump site. It might have been carried off since then.”

“And it’s a lot of ground to cover.” Mical leaned back in his chair, shoulders sagging as the prospect of a long, _long_ search settled on them both. “If it were something less dangerous, I would say that we need to organize search parties. But a Sith holocron—“ he waved a hand wearily in the air “—it’s just too dangerous to the unwary mind.”

“And we don’t want word getting out that there’s a holocron here.” Kalani couldn’t even look out the window without catching sight of a crater; the one closest was still ringed with massive clods of earth and stone, the broken bones of Dantooine left to bleach and dry in the sun. “I think Dantooine has had enough unwanted attention to last until the end of time.”

Mical smiled sadly—and that sadness struck at something inside of Kalani whose name she couldn’t quite recall. “That, too.”

They sat, a bit too tender in that heavy, weary sadness to say anything, the sadness paralyzing them too much to go on. It hit Kalani all over again what had become of the home of her childhood, and she wished she could leave this place and never return, and let the memories of the broken shell of the Enclave become less real than her memories of the place whole, even as she knew she was going to have to lay eyes on it broken open again today. Whether or not he was being entirely honest with her, the fellow-feeling that shot up between them was real. The warm, soft sadness that rolled off of him was real. It might have been naïve—it was _definitely_ naïve—but she couldn’t believe he meant her or her crew any real harm.

“Oh, _hell._ ”

And then Kalani remembered something.

Mical’s eyes snapped to her face. “What is it?” he asked, concerned.

Kalani pressed a hand to her mouth and groaned. “Yesterday, when I was first heading towards the Enclave, I passed by a camp of salvagers. One of them said he had a _holocron_ for sale. I thought he was just running some sort of scam, but if he was telling the truth…”

Mical nodded decisively, suddenly much firmer than the young man Kalani had known for a little less than a day. “There’s only one way to know for certain.”

-0-0-0-

“You certainly seem to know your way around.” Kalani had let Mical lead the way, just to see what would happen. He led them towards the Enclave with such surety that the idea that this was only the second time he had been there grew more and more ridiculous with each footstep.

“I was given very detailed maps,” Mical told her airily. “I studied them diligently before I arrived.”

“Liar,” Kalani muttered, and trusted the wind howling across the grassy plains of Dantooine to drown out her voice.

The little spires of smoke from the fires in the shantytown the salvagers called a settlement came into view before the settlement itself. Again, there was that fetid odor of sweat and feces and rotting food, but this wasn’t Kalani’s first exposure to it, and she had smelled far, far worse in her time—she was inured to such odors. A glance at Mical caught him wrinkling his nose, and no more. She smiled at him in spite of herself. ( _And told herself not to ignore the way her memory was pricking at the front of her mind._ )

The man who had claimed to have a holocron for sale was hardly difficult to find again; Kalani and Mical found him half-advertising-to, half-harassing one of the locals who sold the salvagers food. Mical’s eyebrows shot up as they watched the poor Twi’lek try to extricate herself from a conversation about the supposedly wondrous baubles the salvager had scrounged from the Jedi Enclave. “He certainly knows how to make himself popular, doesn’t he?” Mical murmured.

“He’s potentially about to become a lot more popular,” Kalani replied, “and I don’t think he’d like how that feels. Come on.”

The Twi’lek, her black-dappled blue lekku twitching irritably, stormed past them as Kalani and Mical neared the salvager and his little “stand.” “Good morning… Ralon, wasn’t it?”

Ralon’s narrow, weather-beaten face lit up at their approach. “Ah, you have returned!” the eagerness in his voice was equal parts hunger and desperation. Maybe desperation was stronger, and Kalani wondered uneasily if it had been absent yesterday, or if it had been there and she just hadn’t been looking for it, because she was convinced he was just a scam artist. “Have you rethought looking at my wares?”

“Yes, I have,” Kalani said firmly, if significantly more quietly than Ralon’s bombastic tones. “Specifically, the hol—“

“Ah!” Ralon’s dark eyes darted around the camp; he understood some need for caution, at least. “Say no more, madame! If you and your companion would follow me?”

Under other circumstances, Kalani supposed she might have been concerned that this shifty man was leading her and Mical—who, while capable enough at evasion to reach the Enclave sublevel unharmed, had yet to give any indication of what he was like in close-quarters combat against an intelligent opponent—to a tent at the far edge of the camp, a position that would be difficult to escape from if need be. But she was armed, blaster pistol and vibroblade both, and if it wasn’t safe (for multiple reasons) to use the Force here, she could say with confidence that she was feeling much stronger in body than she had when she woke up on the Peragus mining station. A cause was good for that. She wasn’t feeling worried. Just a little impatient, and better not to let Ralon see that.

The interior of Ralon’s canvas tent didn’t smell any better than the rest of the camp. If anything, the close quarters and lack of air flow made the tent smell _worse_ than the rest of the camp. A flutter of movement to her left, and Kalani looked to see Mical visibly struggling not to gag as they sat down on an overturned crate.

 _Careful_ , she mouthed to him, nodding to Ralon, who stood with his back turned to them as he rummaged through a crate full of odds and ends.

Mical quirked a rueful smile, and mouthed something that might have been _I am trying_.

At last, Ralon pulled out a bundle wrapped in cloth and sat down on the overturned crate opposite them. “Behold, my friends, the rarest find imaginable from the Jedi Enclave, an intact holocron, and it can be yours for a mere one thousand credits.”

With a flourish, Ralon whipped off the cloth and showed them the “holocron.”

Kalani heaved a sigh. Eyebrows raised, she looked into Ralon’s entirely too eager face. “Impressive, truly,” she said tiredly.

“I _know_. You wouldn’t believe the trouble I went through to—“

“Again, impressive.” Kalani fixed Ralon in a flat stare that saw him wilt slightly, even before going on: “Looking at this, I can well believe that you have at least seen a Jedi holocron at some point in your life, which does suggest some things about your background. But this?” She jerked the “holocron”—a lovely recreation, really, but cold and lifeless in her grasp—out of Ralon’s hand and held it aloft, frowning first at it, then at him. “Is not a holocron.”

Sweat began to bead on Ralon’s forehead. “I assure you, madame—“

“It isn’t real.” It was Mical who interjected this time, and though his voice might have been soft, there was a steely certainty to it—so he, too, could tell at just a glance?—that made the words die on Ralon’s lips. “As she said, it is a good forgery, but a forgery is all that it is.”

Ralon had nothing to say, this time—judging by the way he was starting to shake, he seemed to realize he’d been had. Mical took the fake holocron out of Kalani’s hand and actually started to go over the inconsistencies one by one, while sweat began to drip down Ralon’s face in earnest. Kalani, meanwhile, pulled the scarf draped over her head a little closer—it was _not_ warm in here, for all that nervous sweat—and began to think.

All she had needed was to look at the holocron and not feel the Force flowing through it to know that she was looking at a forgery. Mical might have been allowed to study Jedi holocrons as well as Sith, but given just how quickly he, too, had become convinced the holocron was a forgery… Given how quickly, he had likely seen—and felt—just what Kalani had.

But more than that, they were no closer to their goal than they had been when they set out this morning. They’d gone looking for a Sith holocron and found the simulacrum of a Jedi holocron, and wasted daylight doing it. And there was something else she needed to deal with, in here.

“Who _are_ you people?!” Ralon burst out at last. He eyed each of them in turn, his face twisting in something close to a snarl. “You’re not _Jedi_ , are you?”

“No,” Mical said in decidedly clipped tones. “I am a historian working for the Republic. I was tasked with taking stock of Jedi sites; as such, I am well-versed in distinguishing real artifacts from false ones.”

“I am no Jedi,” Kalani murmured, “but you, Ralon, do you know what a holocron is?”

“Well, I…” Ralon squirmed in his seat, sweat bathing his face so that it looked as if he’d dipped his head in one of the aqueducts near Khoonda. “It’s a… The holocron’s…”

“A holocron,” and Kalani worked to keep her voice soft, keep it measured, because this was important, “is a repository of knowledge. Not simply on matters of the Force—though there is plenty of that; they are tools of the Jedi, after all—but also star charts, planetary maps, lexicons, starship blueprints, books of medicine and poisons, historical data, and more.”

A weak giggle escaped Ralon’s mouth. “Is that what it is?”

“And do you know, also, that with the Jedi gone, their holocrons are highly sought-after? By the Republic, by people of wealth, by bounty hunters and crime lords and assassins? That there are people in the galaxy who would stop at nothing to possess one?”

“Of course I do!” Ralon protested, and Kalani supposed it was just as well that he had missed the potential implied threat in her words—it would be easier to make her actual point. “Why do you think I wanted so much for it?”

The silence that followed could have felled a rancor.

Mical blinked once, twice, three times. “…You… truly do not understand the value of a Jedi holocron, do you?” came out in the sort of tone as if he couldn’t decide whether or not he was being scammed again.

Kalani had to resist the urge to tip her head back and groan. Once she trusted herself to speak calmly—this really was important—she fixed Ralon in a piercing stare and asked him, “So you understand how dangerous it is even to claim to have a holocron in your possession? You understand how many people might come looking for you and your prize, what kind of people they are? And what they would likely do to you once they discovered the deception?”

“I…” Ralon jutted out his jaw. “I do.”

“Then why take that risk?” Kalani pressed. “I don’t think you’re doing this purely out of greed. Why take such a horrible risk when there are other things you could sell, other ways you could make your living?”

There came another charged silence, and from the way Ralon’s face contorted, Kalani wondered if she hadn’t miscalculated. But then that sweaty, strained face crumpled, and Ralon hid his face in his hands. “You don’t understand.” His voice was muffled, but Kalani would have recognized the quality of despair even if he had remained silent.

“I might. Tell me.”

He tried to straighten, though with his shoulders still sagging couldn’t completely manage it. There were tracks on his face that Kalani couldn’t tell if they were from sweat or tears. “Okay. I… Before the bombardment, I worked in the Enclave as an electrical technician. You wondered where I’d seen a holocron; that’s where. When Malak came—“ he licked his lips, eyes going white and wild as memory coated the present day “—when Malak came, my family and I lost everything. I can’t get proper work; guilt by association,” he said with a grimace. “Salvaging’s the only way I can get any credits.”

“That’s not all there is to this, though, is it?” It couldn’t be. It didn’t cover the breadth of his desperation.

And sure enough, Ralon shook his head choppily. “I… I borrowed some money. Trying to get enough to get off-world, but they hiked the passenger fare right after, so we’re stuck.” His hands were shaking now, and his voice listed between high and low. “If I don’t pay off my creditors, my wife and our daughter, they’ll be…”

Sold. That much, he didn’t have to say aloud.

Kalani sighed heavily and leaned back on her crate, thinking. She had an idea of what to do. She’d catch it from Kreia later, and probably from Atton and Mira, too. But it was like Atton said of her all the way back on Citadel Station—she never could turn a deaf ear to a sob story. Even one that she knew could be a lie.

“Alright.” Kalani drew up to her full (not at all impressive, but the effort counted) height and stared firmly at Ralon. “Here are my terms. I will _not_ pay you a thousand credits for that box. It is a pretty recreation, but a recreation is all it is. As it stands, I certainly don’t have the credits to pay you the true value of a real Jedi holocron. I’d be surprised if any individual person on this planet does.

“What I will do is pay you the money you need to pay off your debts, and take your family and leave Dantooine.” Kalani frowned sternly at him. “And do not lie to me.”

She was definitely going to hear about this from Kreia later—it wouldn’t be any use hiding from it; she would just _know_ , as if she had been here herself. Likely something about weakening this man by saving him from his troubles instead of leaving him to struggle out of them himself, and strengthen himself from the results of conflict. Atton would complain—and truth be told, Kalani could hardly blame him—about what the sudden loss of the credits would do to their finances. Mira… It was hard to tell with Mira. To an extent, she was very much a “you made your bed; now lie in it” sort of person. But needless callousness and cruelty were things that just seemed to disgust her, and the potential collateral damage of this matter…

Oh, well. In the end, this was her decision to make, and she couldn’t regret it.

They worked out a figure of five hundred credits, and given the way Ralon’s lips kept twisting, Kalani suspected that if he had exaggerated, it wasn’t by very much. All the while, Mical watched them in silence, watchful and frowning thoughtfully, as if he was a teacher evaluating some sort of verbal exam.

Before they left (with the box; if someone came looking for it, at least Ralon could claim truthfully that he had sold his “holocron”), Kalani spared a last line of questions for Ralon. “Where will you go, when you leave Dantooine?”

Ralon shrugged. Credits in hand, he seemed much calmer than he had earlier, though the shreds of nervous energy still clung to his back and shoulders. “I… I haven’t really thought that far ahead. Everywhere nearby’s gone to hell and I was just concentrating on getting anywhere that wasn’t here.”

“Have you thought of Telos?”

“ _Telos_?” Ralon laughed incredulously. “Lady, Telos got fragged straight to hell in the war. There’s nothing there but poison and dead bodies.”

So Kalani too had thought when she first laid eyes on that world. Death had reached out to her mind and screamed in her bones, and it hadn’t drawn back its hooks until she went down to the surface and stood in the Restoration Zone. “There’s Citadel Station,” she said, instead of suggesting the Restoration Zone. “The Telos Security Force is short on personnel; so long as you don’t tell them about…” She held the box aloft again “…this, I don’t think they’d blink at your application. It’s not the safest work in the world, but it’s honest work, at least. Something to think about!”

And they emerged back into air that was not fresh, but at least promised to become such once they were well away from the salvagers’ camp. That was how far they walked, before Kalani and Mical stopped to decide where they would search next.

“I’m surprised,” Mical said softly, as they pored over the map they’d taken from Khoonda, “at how you handled that man. There are many who wouldn’t have shown him nearly as much patience—or compassion. After discovering he had tricked us, you could have just walked away.”

Kalani shrugged her shoulders, looking at the map rather than his eyes. “I… It’s difficult to explain.” Certainly, Kreia had tried to make her explain herself more than once, and she’d never been able to find an explanation that satisfied either of them. “When I see someone in need of help, if there is anything I can do to help them, I do it. It’s… You may think it naïve, or meddlesome, but that’s how it is with me.”

“I’m not complaining,” Mical told her hastily. “There are so many people in the galaxy who care for nothing beyond their own good; it’s refreshing to meet someone who cares for others in need. But I am curious. You really could have simply walked away after the deception was revealed. And I think we both know he could have been lying.”

Kalani shrugged again, if a bit more easily. “If he was lying about everything, about being in debt, about having a wife and child who would be sold—“ her lip curled “—to pay for his debt, it’s still true that he was in danger of being killed by anyone who came looking for the holocron he claimed to have. I don’t think he was lying, though, not about everything. And if he was telling the truth, then if nothing else is true, it’s certainly true that Ralon’s wife and child don’t deserve to pay the price for his poor decisions.”

“They don’t, no.” Mical smiled at her then, but it was not a happy smile, not exactly. It was something wistful and nostalgic, something old, something familiar. Something of this place, and Kalani was certain he didn’t know he was doing it, because there was no effort made to wipe the look off of his face.

-0-0-0-

In the end, their next choice ended up being made on account of Mical’s curiosity. There was a site some distance from the Enclave, but still within reasonable walking distance of their own location, that had been heavily bombed when Malak attacked Dantooine. Mical thought, and surveys of the area seemed to back up the idea, that that particular site might have been more heavily bombed than the Enclave itself.

The site was a mystery to Kalani. When she had lived in the Enclave, Jedi had been forbidden to go there unless ordered by the Dantooine Council. She knew nothing of it, and that combined with the moratorium on travel, well, she would have been lying if she said it didn’t pique her curiosity as well, just a little.

“Let’s go there, then.”

As they walked, the day was silent but for the howling of the wind over the grass and the occasional gnarled, wounded tree. The kath hounds and kinrath (and Kalani was still trying to puzzle out what possessed the later to leave their haunts during the daylight hours) didn’t seem to want to go near this part of the planes. The brith that Kalani had been so fascinated by as a child were gone—all dead, or else gone seeking greener pastures, where there was nothing to shoot them out of the sky.

Even when you discounted the bled-dry wreckage of the Jedi Enclave, Dantooine had been wounded nearly unto death. The scream echoed in the minds of the residents who had been here when turbolasers cascaded upon the landscape, and even among those who had not been here, the scream sometimes emanated, more faintly, as if it was just beginning to take root there. The craters that marred the horizon were like the pitted holes in rotting fruit, but there was still life here regardless, clinging to dry earth watered only with tears. It was difficult, telling whether vitality would ever truly return to Dantooine, or if it would die by inches until it was empty, and the wind traveled forever, and never met anything with the ability to leave a lasting impression upon the surface.

_What can anyone do against something such as this? When the wealthy can be persuaded to lend their aid and the powerful actually care to do something, then there is a chance, but when it’s the poor scrabbling against the tide of entropy and everything seems arrayed against them, trying to knock them down and scatter them into nothing, what are they to do?_

_I suppose Kreia would say this is the test of their right to exist, or something like that._ Kalani pursed her lips, and wondered what it was that had so thoroughly convinced Kreia that offering or accepting help in matters such as this was an evil. What it was that had convinced her that the only way someone could become truly strong was by becoming strong alone, without help from anyone else.

She could worry about that after they had found the holocron and disposed of it.

As they neared the site, jagged spires of broken stone reaching up to the yellowing sky like pleading fingers, Kalani and Mical both stopped, standing very still as they stared down at the mounds of rubble.

This had been a place of great power, once. She did not need to read a report or listen to Kreia telling tales of Dantooine to know that. She could feel it in the air, the echoes of that power, mostly gone, but still present enough to carry a charge. It sang to her, and though it sang with no words that any mortal ear could have discerned, she knew what it was saying, nonetheless.

 _Not this again_.

And beneath it, there was something she knew entirely too well.

“You told me your name, yesterday.” Mical’s voice came to her as though from far away, though she could not hear the wind in her ears, and she doubted he could, either. “You said that it was Kalani Nuna. Now that we’re here… You, you were General Nuna during the Mandalorian Wars, were you not?”

“Yes.” Her voice sounded like nothing she could ever remember coming out of her mouth before.

“You were the infantry commander for the Dxun campaign. There was an…” He paused, brow furrowing and mouth working, like he was struggling even to get words out. “…An incident on Dxun related to Sith holocrons.”

“…Yes.”

“…What happened?”

Kalani took a breath, having to fight against the air to draw air in. “If you know there was an incident, you should know the particulars.”

“It’s buried under redactions, and I don’t have the level of clearance necessary to know the whole story. But you… You did encounter Sith holocrons on Dxun, did you not?”

“I……… Yes.”

Another long pause, and Mical struggled to even speak. “You… Are we in danger?”

At this, she laughed, but it was a bitter, hollow sound. “Oh, yes. But so is everyone else, if it is not disposed of.”

She walked down the slope towards the ruins. She didn’t tell Mical to follow her. She didn’t signal him to follow her in any way. But she could hear footsteps against the grass anyways, and she didn’t bother telling him to stay back. She didn’t think he would have, and of the Sith holocrons she had contended with on Dxun, she had never been able to figure out just how far their influence stretched. It had varied. She had no guarantee that he would have been safe at the crest of the slope.

Every step down the slope was a step back into the past. The grass grew longer and longer, pulling on her knees, then her waist. The air grew closer and closer, became charged with static electricity and thick with rain and suspended condensation. The smell of water and earth and blood and oil and ozone filled her nostrils, and Kalani thought she heard voices that were right in her ears, and yet were faint and whispery, as if coming from far off. She clutched at the hilt of her vibroblade and realized only when her hand clutched at a hilt that felt very different than it should have that she was clutching a vibroblade, and not a lightsaber. She reached for her blaster instead.

The spires of stone cast long, dark shadows across the ground that bled from dark brown to black with scarcely any effort. They made it difficult to see the ground, see if it was grass there or stone, if the ground was smooth or broken. That feeling that had buried itself inside of her, that undercurrent of bitter cold grew stronger the deeper Kalani went into the ruins.

“Do you see light?” Mical was whispering to her. She didn’t know why he was whispering, didn’t know why whispering felt right to her.

“I…”

She didn’t, not at first. She looked ahead of her and saw only shadows. But Kalani blinked once, twice, three times, and she saw light winking at her from some thirty feet away. Red and flickering and pulsing with a power she recognized immediately.

“That’s it.” Her voice was choked. “And I think… I think it’s open.”

At this point, Kalani would, in retrospect, reflect that she really should have told Mical to turn back, even if the likelihood of his listening to her was slim to none. In the moment, she barely remembered he was there as she stepped forward, towards the source of the light.

In her nightmares, the holocrons were always bigger. Sometimes they swallowed men whole, and for that they needed to be bigger. They were twisted, distorted things that pulsed and writhed and sprouted vines with which to strangle everything that crossed its path. They needed to be bigger for that.

In her nightmares, the holocrons were always bigger, and it had been more than ten years since she had last laid eyes on a real one. So when she found this small pyramid of a box, glass and metal and a glowing red core, slightly open, it was a shock. Of course it was. She didn’t expect it to be so _small_.

It was open, the holocron was open, and that had its consequences. It had a voice to speak, and that had its consequences.

Last time, Kalani had not been among the first targeted—it was probably the only reason she was here to freeze before an open Sith holocron now. She had had other duties outside of the abandoned temple, and had sent teams in to survey the area and determine if it was fit for habitation. And the men she had sent in, they hadn’t succumbed immediately. The holocrons had yet to glut themselves on death and grow powerful enough to have immediate effects. But there had been signs. There had been…

There had been…

It spoke to her. They liked to talk, Sith holocrons, they had begged and pleaded and berated as she ordered them packed into a crate and fired into the sun.

Behind her, there was a dull thud like something falling, but she couldn’t imagine what that might be. The voice of the holocron filled her ears and it spoke of death, gloried in the death that clung to her like a noxious veil. There was a way out of everything she was feeling, it told her, a very simple way out.

Her arm lifted the blaster almost of its own accord.

There was such a simple way out, and she could have it _right now_ if she just—

The holocron exploded in a spray of glass and shards of red light, and Kalani knew no more.

-0-0-0-

When Kalani woke up, she wasn’t in the ruins anymore, but lying flat on her back on the slope leading down to it. The scarf she had been wearing over her head had been folded and placed under it as a sort of pillow. The sky was a dark, ochre yellow, tinged ever so faintly with red. Her head hurt terribly.

“Oh, you’re awake.” Mical’s voice, taut and a touch unsteady, filtered to her after a moment of confused disorientation. “That’s… That’s good. Here.” A hand slid between her shoulders and pushed her upright. “Sit up. I need to check for a concussion.”

Kalani frowned at him. “How long have I been unconscious?”

“Not long; about a quarter of an hour, I’d say.” That hand moved to her shoulder, and it was impossible for Kalani to miss the way it shook. “It’s not really good practice to move someone who might have a concussion, but I didn’t think it wise to stay in the ruins. I…” He licked his lips. “…I was afraid it would have certain effects.”

They went through the process of confirming that no, Kalani did _not_ have a concussion. This was not her first go at having to reassure an anxious medic that she hadn’t sustained a brain injury, and the process of proving (out in the field, anyways; in a more formal setting she knew there would have been a _lot_ more tests) that had not become any less tedious in the last ten years. It was over very quickly, despite the fact that Mical kept tripping over the steps, which was a small mercy, at least.

When this was over with, Kalani drew a deep breath, tried to center herself. She’d had training to ignore pain, move past it. It had been so long ago, but surely she hadn’t forgotten all of it. Some things were ingrained too deeply in the body to ever be truly forgotten. And she did remember, after a while, and if she didn’t remember all of it, she at least remembered enough to get the headache down to manageable levels. Enough to ask questions.

“Alright, so…” Kalani forced her mind back—only a few minutes, really, but such a struggle regardless. “I believe I shot the holocron. Perceptions can become distorted around Sith holocrons, so I would just like to confirm: did you see me shooting the holocron?”

Mical leaned back on the grass, scrubbing at his forehead as he apparently struggled to remember. “I… believe so. I came to just after it was destroyed. The holocron had been shattered, and there was a scorch mark on the ground where it had been consistent with scoring from a blaster. At any rate, it is destroyed, and…” His face twisted. “Though I would have liked the chance to study it, that was always contingent on its not having been opened before I found it.”

Kalani nodded, and immediately regretted it, even as the pain was starting to die down. “They really are too dangerous for anything and everything in their proximity. If you had been around it long enough for it to get its hooks in you, you would have regretted it.”

“I suppose.”

They sat on the hillside for Kalani didn’t know how long (it couldn’t have been that long; the sky was darkening to orange, but never went completely dark), catching their breath and their bearings. Kalani supposed she should check in with the _Ebon Hawk_ —she’d never been terribly clear on when her crew could expect her back, and someone was bound to come looking for her if she wasn’t back by the next morning—but she couldn’t find it in her to activate her comm. They weren’t that far from the spaceport. And there was something else she needed to do first.

“You and I,” she said heavily, “we have met before, haven’t we?”

There was a long silence, and she didn’t look over to him, didn’t look at Mical’s face. She could guess at the way his face twisted, could practically _feel_ the way his face twisted. “Yes.” She could barely hear him over the wind. “We have.”

Now, Kalani looked over at him, and the sight of his face wasn’t as bad as she’d thought it would be. No mask of agony here, just the soft bitterness of nostalgia and paths that don’t lead where they had promised they would. “Here?”

“Yes, here,” he said softly. “Long ago, I was an initiate at this Enclave. You guest-taught at one of my classes; the normal instructor was away from the Enclave on a mission. It…” He laughed ruefully. “…Your teaching and your example made an impression. One that has lasted to this day.”

And when she thought about it, she remembered one of the classes she had guest-taught—there had been more than one, there had been a need to keep a Padawan who couldn’t keep a master occupied—and remembered a young boy who had followed after her when the lesson was done, peppering her with questions. It was such a long time ago.

“So you left the Order?” It wasn’t framed as an accusation, nor even meant as one. By the end, Kalani wasn’t certain she would have stayed on as a Jedi, even had she not been exiled. The Order… The Order had not been what it once was. It no longer held true to the principles it had proclaimed when Kalani was young. It no longer held true to a great many things.

But Mical shook his head. “I washed out. I came of age still an initiate, and there was no one willing to take me on as their apprentice. I had to make my way on my own, and that led me to the Republic.”

“Wouldn’t that have been difficult, though? You must have had some training with the Force, and going about half-trained, exposed to the war…”

“You can forget those things, you know.” His voice was very soft. It had often been very soft, but now, there was some quality to that softness that made Kalani take notice of it, separate it out as something different. “It takes work, but you can forget the lessons you learned, forget how to feel with the Force. It can lie dormant within you, and fall into a deep sleep, and it can eventually be as if it’s dead, though if the stimulus is strong enough—“ Mical stared blackly down at the ruins, where the shattered remains of a Sith holocron glittered brightly enough to catch the dying light like stars “—it will awaken again, for a time. That is…”

“Deeply unpleasant,” Kalani supplied wearily. When the Force had first reawakened inside of her, it had been agony beyond anything she had ever experienced, agony beyond Dxun, agony beyond Malachor V.

The jittery laugh that hit the air confirmed that she wasn’t the only one who felt that way. “It felt a little as though my skull was an egg, and someone had cracked it open and poured boiling water inside. Though that may simply have been because the stimulus was something of the Sith.”

And maybe the difference for them, why Mical only felt that way when it was something of the Sith and Kalani had felt that way when the stimulus was something far more neutral for that, was something that originated in them. Maybe she wasn’t whole enough anymore to feel anything normally anymore, so that when the Force that she would have sworn was dead and not sleeping reawoke inside of her, it was a rebirth so agonizing that there was a moment when she wished for the death that should have been hers at Malachor. If someone told her that, she wouldn’t have been too shocked. She wasn’t certain she would even have been offended.

“And now?”

It was, perhaps, not the question to ask. Perhaps it was better to leave it unsaid, leave it in the interstice and let it stay amorphous. Curiosity had always been one of those traits to get Kalani in trouble, though, even if it wasn’t in her in as great amounts as it had been in Atris. And she felt as if she owed it to the past she had left behind. Something to put it to bed.

In the deepening dusk, it was difficult to make out what passed over Mical’s face. A shadow, perhaps; a cloud, perhaps. “Now, I think I can best serve the Republic as I am now. Perhaps that might change, but for now, I do not think it would do any good.”

How things had changed. The Kalani Nuna of twenty years ago would have been horrified by that, to hear someone who was clearly strong with the Force refuse training and listen to them as they regarded it… Improper, perhaps, or inappropriate? The Kalani Nuna of twenty years ago had known only one alternative to being a Jedi, and didn’t understand that there were so many different ways to perceive the Force, and that only a few of them were purely Light or Dark. Now, she nodded in weary acceptance, and tried to bat away the guilt she felt when she thought of “ _made an impression, one that has lasted_ ” and the ways that might have influenced him, might have led to where he was now, might have done ill.

Overhead, the sunset and advancing twilight were not as Kalani remembered them from years ago. Even the beauty of Dantooine’s sunsets had died away, leaving only a dull, russet red like dried blood to carry the world into darkness. That darkness was a shelter for so many things, and it provided enough shelter for her to ask, faintly, “When the holocron spoke to you, what did it say?”

Mical sighed. “Nothing I can put into words.” He tapped the lid of his first-aid kit with his fingertip. “Nothing I care to recall.”

Kalani knew that feeling. He was going to fit right in on the _Ebon Hawk_.

“Come on. Let’s go back to Khoonda before it gets too dark.”


End file.
